World of Tanks: Blitzby Matt Taylor
Format previewed on iOS |
Developers; Wargaming
Publisher; Wargaming Formats; Available iOS Release Date; Out now |
World of Tanks: Blitz is perfect on iOS.
Wargaming’s biggest title has made its move to iOS. After spending the last four years of its life on Windows and the Xbox Marketplace, World of Tanks is the undoubted king of massively multiplayer online war simulators, and has grown from a Eastern European battle simulator into an international eSports title. With detailed tank models, realistic battle damage and controls, as well as a registered player base of over 75,000,000 players worldwide, Wargaming.net have managed to take what has made World of Tanks great and distilled it into the best mobile game available on iOS.
As soon as you start World of Tanks: Blitz, you can feel that Wargaming.net have managed to master and understand how to develop for touch-screen controls, allowing players to customise the on-screen controls by size, layout and sensitivity. These are all expected customisation options that you’d get on a computer, not an iPad. Allowing me to move my directional controls into the perfect position for my thumb is the best way to win me over. With the controls comfortably positioned and the icons enlarged or minimised, I managed to sink four hours into Blitz without my hand cramping. In all the years of using Gameboy’s, PSP’s and 3DS’s, I’ve never been able to sink consecutive hours into a mobile platform without exercising my wrists and fingers between lives. With World of Tanks: Blitz, I never had to. The gameplay is simple. In teams of seven, two opposing forces are sent head to head to take a flag placed centrally on the map. The game is over when one team takes the flag or runs out of tanks. In the majority of matches that I played, the winning team won through superior numbers rather than by capturing the flag, but the option is there, and came in useful when in a one-on-one situation. This game mode forces you to think quickly, calmly and methodically. There’s no point trying to capture the flag with three enemy tanks watching over you, but leave it too long and your team mates will begin to be picked off and you’ll have no backup. It can be an endorphin-releasing experience as you and three or four tanks thunder towards the enemy, communicating through the simple text based chat function and coordinating manoeuvres.
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As you play you gain experience and money used to upgrade your tanks. Better weapons, equipment and consumable items can make the worse tanks tolerable, and turn the better tanks into killing machines. Like its big brother, World of Tanks: Blitz is free-to-play but has an optional paid “Premium” service and allows you to pay for extra in-game currency, gain experience faster which can speed up the process of unlocking better vehicles and upgrades. This payment model isn't new, but Wargaming have done it right. Players who pay for better tanks or have upgraded and unlocked higher tiered vehicles are never pitted against lower levelled players. This means you’re fighting players with similar load-outs and tanks, with skill rather than money deciding who wins. It also allows those who are willing to pay to unlock the higher tiered vehicles do what they want. Everybody wins, or at least if you don’t, you don’t feel cheated.
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World of Tanks: Blitz feels close to the main game. Like the World of Tanks, how you play Blitz is up to the player. You can flank behind enemy lines, snipe long-distance targets from behind cover or crash against the advancing opposition, turning their line into the skeletal remains of a mechanised army. Some of major differences that I noticed between the two titles didn’t surprise me. Scale and detail. Smaller maps were expected on a mobile device. The part I missed is the detail to modular damage. This isn't to say there is none, it’s just that I feel that it could be made a little more obvious. You can definitely take out someone's tracks and force them to a stand-still, but I feel that a deeper level of detail for turret and armour damage would turn targeting specific areas of enemy tanks into a skill and not guess work.
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World of Tanks: Blitz is simple, with an easy to master control scheme, objectives that you can understand and a targeting systems that can be explained in a sentence. It was these three elements that allowed me to share World of Tanks: Blitz with my girlfriend. She’d been watching me play a few matches and asked if she could give it a shot (I was using her iPad Mini with Retina Display after all). I handed over the iPad and talked her through the controls. She quickly understood what she needed to do and, more importantly, how to do it. She was soon topping the scoreboards, and as I’m typing this, she’s battling her way through a close match.
World of Tanks: Blitz is the best iOS title I've played. The perfect, comfortable controls and full-bodied World of Tanks experience is now available wherever I go. |
Rating |
5/5 |
Review funds for game provided by Wargaming
Images courtesy of Wargaming
Images courtesy of Wargaming
